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along with his considerable capacity for connecting empathically with others.
    Corinne was the smartest person Marcus had ever met who lacked the edge conferred by having a MELD chip. She was born in 2021 in a small town in western Massachusetts. Her brother Benjamin was born three years later. By the time Benjamin turned two, he’d developed idiosyncrasies of behavior auguring a struggle that would define her family throughout the remainder of her childhood. At that point, Corinne’s life veered sharply off course while her parents devoted most of their attention and modest resources to Benjamin’s needs.
    Corinne knew before any of the adults in her life that her brother was different. When he’d begun to walk, she watched him spinning the wheels of a wooden car for hours on end and twirling himself round and round until he fell down. While she’d been able to cuddle him as an infant, touching him as a toddler became a riskier business. She bore bruises on her face and arms from when he startled and flailed in response to her touch.
    One day when Benjamin was two, she saw him thrashing on the ground in a tantrum, dangerously close to striking his head on the corner of a table. Corinne dove in to protect him and wrapped her arms tightly around his body. The thrashing and screaming stopped. His breathing slowed and his body relaxed. As she released her hold, his breaths once again came in short gasps and his body began to jerk. When she tightened her arms, he again relaxed.
    One of Benjamin’s favorite toys was a stuffed monkey with long, floppy arms and legs. Once Corinne discovered the calming effect of her embrace, she tried tying the monkey’s arms and legs tightly around his body and found that with sufficient pressure it had a similar effect. When she shared her discovery with her mother, her mother fitted the toy with fasteners to make it easier to swaddle Benjamin with it. From that time on, Benjamin and his monkey lived in a perpetual clinch.
    Inanimate objects were the primary focus of Benjamin’s world. He paid little attention to people, seldom looking in their faces and never making eye contact. Of all the people in his life, Corinne was the one who was most able to reach him. While he was tightly wrapped with his monkey, she would take him by both hands, wait for his randomly moving head to come around, and bump noses. The first time she did this, there was no response, but she persisted, and by the fortieth or fiftieth time he laughed. This game between them was repeated thousands of times to his apparent delight, one of the few social responses he’d ever shown.
    Once she was in school, Corinne was left mostly to her own devices to entertain herself while her parents struggled to keep Benjamin safe and did everything they could to address his disabilities. She wandered around the nooks and crannies of the town and was particularly fascinated by someof the older buildings that had been abandoned and fallen into disrepair. One such building was largely hidden behind a dense overgrowth of foliage and had some of its windows boarded up.
    One day when she seven, she noticed after a storm that the boards over one of the windows had come loose. She carefully pulled a couple of them off, creating an opening large enough for her to crawl through. Her heart raced as she pulled herself through the window and tumbled to the floor. Cobwebs hung from the ceilings and the air smelled musty. A shiver went through her. It felt like a haunted house.
    But as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she became aware of row after row of tall shelves, mostly filled with books. She’d had a couple of picture books as a toddler, but most of her experience with the written word had until then been on screens. Never had she seen such an array of volumes. She walked along the aisles, running her fingers over the spines of the books on the lower shelves, feeling the coarse textures of cloth and the sculpted smoothness of leather. The